Category: Poetics

Amy King collaborated with the Guardian to curate this collection of poems. She is the author of five books of poetry, received the 2015 WNBA award, is a founding member of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and teaches Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

The only thing I know, something I must try to communicate to the future, is that a more complex and fatal humor defines the body politic. Amy King’s “Perspective” helps illustrate just how nasty and troubling it is...

Amy King’s workshops and critiques are as intelligent and intuitive as she is. She’s introduced me to conceptual ideas that seem at first complex and perhaps over my head—but the way she breaks them down and incorporates them step by step into fun and challenging exercises makes them so accessible that I find myself pondering and using them in my own poetics again and again. I’ve worked with her several times, and I highly recommend Amy’s teaching style—learned yet lucid, erudite yet playful. She’s a joy!

Out of the masculine guitar-as-erection sound of rock hard hard rock there emerged two women whose voices are iconic: the cool purety of Grace Slick that soared on the updrafts generated by all that electricity to sing a drug-enhanced surreality and the hot distorted whiskey voice of Janis Joplin that, when she sang the blues of blighted love, wailed for a generation. I know I’m pushing it here, but in the music of Amy King’s voice I hear an heir to those two women.

“This, of course, comes as no surprise to those familiar with King’s work. It is uninterested in evenness and regularity. It is adroit and sharp and scream-y (often in literal caps) and rampaging. You don’t disgorge a poem entitled “PUSSY PUSSY SOCHI QUEER PUSSY PUTIN SOCHI QUEER QUEER PUSSY” because you are trying to lull…

EXCERPTS from “Folder“: I have given up on importance. The only things awake to awareness are things that no longer compute when we walk to banks or teach signs in classrooms to make sense of dark matter. E equals life times time times how often you find love. ~~~~ This feeling is adjacent to a…

‘Literature is against us’: In Conversation with Anne Boyer BY AMY KING If you don’t know Anne Boyer’s work, you should. She’s a fierce intellect, tremendous poet, and laudable person. I’m grateful she spent time untangling my meandering questions. Her new book, Garments Against Women, is just out from Ahsahta Press, a perfect fit for Boyer’s…

@ BOSTON REVIEW EXCERPTS (selected by readers / in random order): Poetry is dead by capitalism’s standards—it is not an obvious moneymaking venture, despite traceable employment and readings’ payoffs via the academy—and that emboldens some folks limited by capitalist blinders to herald poetry’s last breath. If Conceptual poets can sensationally spin this mythology and position themselves…

Whacked Out: A Case for the Advocacy of the Unlisted EXCERPTS: I met the place where art and life converge and began to feel—not just intellectually consider—the potential burn poetry could bring to a person’s entirety, psyche included. This “foreign” poetry was about living, conceiving, and feeling in invigorating and consciousness-inducing ways with words that…

“UNDERSTANDING THE POEM” “The problem flashes face forward when I want to ask the poet what she meant when she wrote poetry and she is no longer with us.” ~~~~~ DISCOVER “STOP & FRISK” @ CONNOTATION PRESS ~~~~~

PERLOFF’S RESPONSES CAN BE FOUND @ THE RUMPUS, “BEAUTY AND THE BEASTLY PO-BIZ, PART 2” OR: PART 1 OF “BEAUTY AND THE BEASTLY PO-BIZ” @ THE RUMPUS MAY BE ACCESSED HERE. AMY KING SAYS: July 27th, 2013 at 3:31 pm Hi Marjorie, While yours is an impressive oeuvre, my blog post is not framed as a review…

We are pleased to welcome acclaimed and widely published poet Amy King to Writers on Craft today. Amy King is the author of five collections of poetry: Slaves to Do These Things, I’m the Man Who Loves You, and Antidotes for an Alibi (a Lambda Book Award finalist), all from Blazevox Books. Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want…

The WOM-PO (Discussion of Women’s Poetry) List was started in December 1997 by Annie Finch with an invitation to a small group of poets, critics, and lovers of women’s poetry. These people in turn invited other people to join, and the list has grown into a well-regarded international listserve by spreading through these networks. In…

If one literary response to the 21st century cultural dislocation rooted in big data and its disruptive technologies is a “conceptual” poetics that brands itself as “uncreative writing” and sees its principal mission in terms of a kind of low-level guerilla warfare against intellectual property rights, then another, perhaps more demonstrative poetics would be one…

The gestural lyric and beyond A review of Amy King’s “I Want to Make You Safe” BARRY SCHWABSKY EXCERPT: At a time when the lyric is widely denigrated and often practiced in a defensive mode if at all, her insouciant confidence that it will serve any end is heartening. CONTINUED @ JACKET2

Authors on Artists: Amy King on Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo Paint Is the Abyss’ Law, Living the Accent: Marginalia on Absorption Paint Is the Secretion of Scene on Leonor Fini’s Set I now confer status on you. As in, everything is as good as the next thing. Better yet, in this season,…

I cannot fathom that Walt Whitman was the first to write on a variety of controversies typically attributed to “Song of Myself,” including the complexities of slavery, the overt hand of eroticism, and the soul beyond the confines of religion, atrocities of war, etc. In fact, a number of writers come easily to mind who…

Words and Music by Metta Sáma EXCERPTS: “King’s book is not quiet; hers is an aesthetics of sound fractured, fragmented, compounded, mixed, remixed, sampled, jointed, yes, even anointed. (Check out the cover of this book, it’s sparseness of image, this blaringly red background, these glaringly gray figures, mouths open. Caught mid-pounce (whose in danger? (you…

Words and Music by John Pluecker EXCERPTS: “Amy King is doing God’s work. Of course, I don’t mean God in a traditional Christian way; I mean God in the way that King speaks of God in her recent book, I Want to Make You Safe: …” “The video gave me the feeling of what I…

Harriet @ Poetry Foundation remarks, “you’ve got to check out Esque Mag Issue 3 … It’s beautiful.” Announcing Esque (click!) For the third issue of esque, REVOLUTIONESQUE, we asked you to tell us about the revolution. We didn’t define what we mean by that. Whether it lives in your home, in the financial district, or the district…